One of James Gandolfini‘s last projects is picking up steam once again. At the time of his passing, the Sopranos actor had been working on an HBO miniseries called Criminal Justice. But since the network could not move ahead with the pilot they had already shot with him, there was some question of how the show could proceed. As of today, we have our answer.

Robert De Niro has just signed on to take over Gandolfini’s role, while Gandolfini will receive a posthumous executive producer credit. The rest of the cast, which includes Riz Ahmed, Bill Camp, Payman Maadi, and Poorna Jagannathan, remains on board. Steve Zaillian, who’s been shepherding the project for the past several years, will direct the first episode. Hit the jump for plot details and more. Read More »

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Despite the terrible news of legendary film critic Roger Ebert‘s passing, the film about the man himself will go on. Steve James, the Oscar-nominated director of Hoop Dreams, took to Twitter to tell everyone that despite the tragic news, he and producers Martin Scorsese and Steve Zaillian will finish Life Itself, a documentary on the life of Roger Ebert based on his memoir of the same title.

When Steven Spielberg officially fell away from the DreamWorks project Gods and Kings, leaving the director’s chair open for potential occupation by Ang Lee, we knew that the film’s sagging momentum would be an opportunity for Fox to push its own Moses movie forward.

Ridley Scott has been developing the film, Exodus, at Fox. (Its relationship to Otto Preminger’s 1960 film is in title only, we presume. The film’s relationship to the book of the same name in the Hebrew Bible is likely more direct.) Originally written by Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, it has a new draft by Steve Zaillian. Ridley Scott reportedly wants to make it his next film after The Councellor, and now he may have Christian Bale as his Moses. Read More »

Because it was based on the first of a trilogy of books, David Fincher‘s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was inspiring sequel talk even before the first film started shooting. Yet over a year since the film’s theatrical release, Sony’s made surprisingly little progress on The Girl Who Played With Fire.

Some wondered if Sony’s financial woes or Fincher’s reluctance to return could be to blame, but now a report suggests that the real holdup may in fact be star Daniel Craig. Fortunately for Steig Larsson fans and unfortunately for the Skyfall star, there’s a totally doable fix — his character, Mikael Blomkvist, could simply be written out of the story altogether. Hit the jump to keep reading.

No matter how many projects Ridley Scott has on his plate, he always seems to find room for one more. The very busy filmmaker has just signed on to produce a remake — I’m sorry, “reimagining” — of The Day Britain Stopped, a BBC pseudo-documentary that aired in 2003. The disaster pic will see Scott re-teaming with Steve Zaillian, the writer-producer who last collaborated with Scott on American Gangster. Read the details, then watch the full telefilm, after the jump.

It doesn’t feel like the last time we reported on a US remake of TimeCrimes was almost a year ago. But it was back in January that Steven Zaillian was reported as the screenwriter responsible for the roadmap for the remake of Nacho Vigalondo‘s fan-favorite time-travel thriller.

He was working from a previous draft from Tim Sexton, and Zaillian was producing as well. Rumors that David Cronenberg might direct had been scuttled, and at the time we didn’t know who might direct the remake. Now, while doing the press rounds for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which Zaillian wrote, he says that he’d like to direct the TimeCrimes remake. Read More »

Editor’s Update: Entertainment Tonight has aired the full trailer for Moneyball (with only minor annoying voice over). Watch it now embedded after the jump. Thanks to /Film reader Eric B for the tip.

If you wind the clock back to mid-2009 and took a look at /Film you’d find the film Moneyball as one of our most-covered topics. The film took an unusual path to the screen when Steven Soderbergh‘s version of the movie was canned at the last minute by Sony chief Amy Pascal. The movie was shopped to other studios, which passed on it, and Soderbergh soon left the project. Several writers worked on the project, but eventually there was a Steve Zaillian draft rewritten by Aaron Sorkin, which then got a last polish from Mr. Zaillian before Bennett Millercame on to direct the movie.

Throughout the process, Brad Pitt was set to play Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane, who worked with a young statistician, eventually played by Jonah Hill, to revamp the hiring process for the A’s. They built the cheapest winning team in baseball, and their approach certainly did change some of the business practices behind the game. Now a trailer is about to hit for Bennett Miller’s version of the film, and the firt clips of footage debuted on ET last night. Check out that montage after the break. Read More »

After the success of Star Trek, Paramount decided to enter the Chris Pine business in a serious way. The company set the actor to star in Star Trek 2 and tapped him for the reboot of Tom Clancy‘s Jack Ryan character, who had previously been played by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck. But development of the Jack Ryan film has been more difficult than perhaps the studio expected, and now it sounds like that film is being pushed back to make way for a fall shoot for Star Trek 2. Read More »

Martin Scorsese has a number of promising projects on his plate to follow Hugo Cabret: reps say he’ll next makeSilence, and then there is a possible indie version of The Wolf of Wall Street, with other movies on the far horizon. One of those is The Irishman, which has been talked up as a reunion of the director with actors Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino. Evidently it is still a going concern, as Robert De Niro said over the weekend. Read More »